I don’t know but I’ve never really enjoyed watching Lara all that much. People say he has flair – which he does, obviously – but he doesn’t have grace – he's so busy at the crease, and he’s got that high, high backlift which I don’t particularly love. As for who’s better I don’t care to be honest, they’re both all time greats, but I’d say if Lara has the edge in sheer brilliance (and only just mind you – Ponting himself was a child prodigy) then Ponting would far supersede him on the mental side. Ponting's absolute belief in his ability and capacity to never let anything fluster him, to keep batting to its basics is extraordinary and why he is so consistent. I think he also gets a bad wrap in the watchability stakes. Sure he’s not a beautiful batsman but I think he too has flair – he can punch off the back foot in a lovely fashion and his pull shot is one of my all time favourite strokes in terms of beauty. He plays it so easily and with so much time.

'It is hard to recall a batsman quite so serene, so unrushed, so unflappable.' Chris Ryan on ... look to the left. Ahhhh.

Did I say it wasn't present, or didn't have an impact (even if I think you in particular are fond of dramatically overstating this impact)? No, what I said was that this change coincided with his improvement, which was essentially that he grew up and became comfortable with his game at test level - which is why he improved so dramatically. I'd say roughly, maybe 5 of the 30 points his average improved came from conditions, the other 25-odd runs improvement came from himself.

I don't. I think it's far too much of a coincidence that the Ponting rise in average coincided exactly with something similar for so many others. As I said, that Ponting has improved his skills of concentration is a given, but I don't think that happened at the exact time he started scoring runs. Nor do I think anyone - not Ponting, not anyone else - had a cat-in-hell's chance of averaging 70 or 65 over a time of 7 years under the circumstances that the first part of Ponting's career was conducted under.

But this can easily be lost if one takes a dogmatic approach to discounting players from this period because you've got rose-tinted glasses about cricket in the 90s.

Tempted to Rolleyes that myself. I have nothing of the sort, nor has anyone really. It's nothing to do with rose-tinted glasses and everything to do with accepting reality.